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Escape-ism

Never count out Ian Svenonius (Nation of Ulysses, the Make-Up, Weird War, etc.). At an age when most rockers are running on fumes, the 50-year-old eccentric rabble-rouser’s still testing out new alter egos and tweaking his trademark moves into fresh output. Latest case in point is Escape-ism, a project I want to assume is named after the funky, early-’70s James Brown song. Svenonius’s two albums under this handle—Introduction to Escape-ism and The Lost Record—find him wielding guitar and drum machine to live out his own twisted Suicide dream (baby dream), with help from Zumi on sax and F Bermudez on keyboards and percussion. Escape-ism isn’t as cutthroat of a proposition as electro-punk pioneers Suicide (pun intended), but it is an entertaining homage that still retains Svenonius’s meta-kitsch charm.